Trailer & Manifold.

Pretty nice day yesterday - sunny, calm, temps in the low to mid-forties - so I decided to finish installing the sides on the trailer project. The only thing left is to install the aluminum angle that caps off the top of the plywood. That should be easy enough to do since I've already got the pieces cut and drilled. I might paint the plywood if I get real ambitious. It's an exterior grade of plywood, but it will probably last longer with some paint on it, plus, it will look nicer with a complementary color of green on it.

After bolting the sides on the trailer, I did a little bit on the jitney manifold. I TIG welded the spacers onto the manifold with silicon bronze rod. I've only used that a couple of times before, but I figured it would be a good process for the job. I ran a couple of warm-up beads on a piece of scrap to get my machine settings right, polished up the spacers and the manifold and went to work. I forgot to clean the oil out of the threads inside the spacers which contaminated the weld on the first one I did. And then I made it worse by trying to weld over my initial weld. Like most always - didn't get better, just got bigger. The second one came out looking like it should, however. 

I need to plug the threaded holes in the manifold that were the original mounting holes for the stock carburetor. The new carb is a dual throat and the holes will overlap the threaded holes just a tad. I also need to do a bit of welding and machine work for the other two spacers/stand-offs for the adaptor plate. I've narrowed it down to two different ways of doing it, so it'll be one or the other next time I decide to work on it.

Weather looks to be warm this coming week. I need to capitalize on that. The Missus gets the first of her cataracts taken care of this week, so I'll be helping her out a bit. Should be able to get some more shop work done just the same.